Walt Stack

(This piece is for my book titled Pacesetters: Runners Who Informed Me Best and Inspired Me Most. I am posting an excerpt here each week, this one from March 1995.)

EVERYBODY’S BUDDY. Walter Stack and San Francisco were made for each other. He might not have become a civic treasure anywhere but here, in a city that not only tolerates quirky behavior but celebrates it.

Walt was a character, even by San Francisco standards. When he died at age 87, the city’s two newspapers gave this avowed Communist and lifelong hard-laborer a sendoff befitting a statesman.

The Chronicle’s headline called him an “S.F. Legend.” The obituary began by saying his daily run across the Golden Gate Bridge and swim in the Bay “were familiar, inspiring sights on the waterfront.”

Walt’s training routine was legendary, and perhaps mildly exaggerated. He was said to rise at three or four o’clock, run for two or three hours, swim a mile or two – then bike to work at a construction site.

This routine began in his late 50s. The training continued after he retired as a masonry laborer, on into his 80s.

Walt was called “Iron Man” long before the triathlon adopted that name. He of course would complete that race, along with the Western States 100, and scores of other ultras and marathons.

I remember him less for his performances than his personality. He was loud and profane, but had the charm to pull it off. He once said, “You can get by with saying almost anything if you say it with a smile.”

His printed words might have sounded coarse. But he never spoke them without a smile – a slightly off-center smile from a Popeye-like jaw that looked like it had stopped fists in his youthful battles.

He did his fighting as a union organizer. He came to running to play, and he never took these efforts too seriously.

“All this work I’m doing, it don’t mean shit,” he liked to say. “I’m going to croak, just like the rest of you.”

Walt was a prime mover in the Dolphin-South End Runners Club, which chose a turtle as its symbol. Its motto: “Start slow and then taper off.”

He liked to poke fun at his own slowness. I still quote his old line about being stuck at one pace: “If they dropped me out of an airplane, I would fall at 8½ minutes a mile.”

After one laborious race he voiced a classic description of hitting the wall: “I’m going to sue the city for building the road too close to my ass.”

At the start of weekly DSE races in San Francisco, he liked to remind the frontrunners, “Remember, it’s us turkeys in the back who make you hotshots look so good.” He was a special friend of the old, the slow and – most of all – the women.

Joan Ullyot wrote the foreword to his biography, The Running Saga of Walt Stack. She said, “Underneath the rough, tattooed exterior, the corny jokes, the boisterous manner, there is a dedicated and serious idealist. Women laugh at his sometimes off-color remarks and enjoy his frank admiration, because they realize that Walt is the greatest feminist among us.”

Communist. Feminist. Labels quit counting once you got to know and like the person behind them.

Walt, who refused to discuss politics on the run, said, “You can be a real Bircher, I can be a Communist, and I can still love you because I figure you’re a runner. You’re a good Joe, and you’ll feel the same way about me.                    

“You’ll say, `Geez, he’s a dirty Red, but he’s Walt Stack. He’s a runner. He’s my buddy.”

Walt was a buddy to every runner who ever met him. I’m proud to have been one among those thousands.

UPDATE. We tend to live and work among people like ourselves – same educational and income status, same ethnic background. Running is, in theory at least, equally accepting of all – slow and fast, female and male, old and young.

The sport can let us meet people we wouldn’t otherwise get to know. Walt Stack was one of the most special runners I’ve known. In his spirit, the Dolphin South End Running Club’s weekly low-key and low-cost races continue today in San Francisco.

[Many books of mine, old and recent, are now available in two different formats: in print and as ebooks from Amazon.com. Latest released was Miles to Go. Other titles: Going Far, Home Runs, Joe’s Journal, Joe’s Team, Learning to Walk, Long Run Solution, Long Slow Distance, Pacesetters, Run Right Now, Run Right Now Training Log, See How We Run, and Starting Lines, plus Rich Englehart’s book about me, Slow Joe.]

Peter Snell

(This piece is for my book titled Pacesetters: Runners Who Informed Me Best and Inspired Me Most. I am posting an excerpt here each week, this one from January 1990.)

RIGHT FROM THE START. We can’t let the 1989 slip away without marking an anniversary. Twenty-five years have passed since the last great Olympics for English-speaking distance men.

They won four of the five longest track races at Tokyo. Americans remember this as the Billy Mills Olympics for his shocking win in the 10,000, but tend to forget that later, in the 5000, Bob Schul became the country’s last gold medalist on the track at a distance above 800 meters.

Local biases aside, Tokyo really was the Peter Snell Olympics. The New Zealander became the first man in 44 years to win both the 800 and 1500 in the same Games, and no man has doubled that way since 1964.

Snell’s success abruptly altered the way runners everywhere trained, and little has changed since then. Most of the best athletes still train along the lines he made popular: a high-mileage and low-intensity buildup period, a high-quality sharpening period, then a brief period of peak racing.

This was the system devised by Snell’s coach, Arthur Lydiard. He may be the greatest coach ever.

You often can’t separate the man from the method. A charismatic coach such as Lydiard’s contemporary Percy Cerutty of Australia could make any system work if runners had enough confidence in him, but Cerutty’s way only worked well in his presence.

Lydiard’s system worked well all over the world, and still does even though he has done little direct coaching since the 1960s. In his words, Lydiard now “advises athletes and coaches coaches” as a roving lecturer.

“For a long time,” he says, “I have not personally controlled the workouts of my pupils but have acted more the role of adviser. Frankly, once these runners have absorbed the elements of my system, and gained the maturity to understand them and their own reactions to them, they haven’t needed my constant presence.”

Peter Snell parted with Lydiard before the 1964 Games but continued to train as before. Snell then retired less than a year after his twin wins in Japan.

He went to work in public relations for a cigarette company. Then his conscience began to bother him about representing that product and about having no college education.

In his 30s Snell enrolled as a freshman at the University of California in Davis. He eventually earned a Ph.D. in exercise science.

Now 51, Snell works in the Human Performance Laboratory at Dallas’s Southwestern Medical School. He still runs but does his competing mainly in triathlons.

Last summer Arthur Lydiard came to Dallas on one of his frequent trips to this country, He visited Dr. Snell at the lab, and Peter took the opportunity to run tests on his former coach.

“It was an opportunity to exact a measure of revenge for all those rigorous workouts he put us through,” Snell tells Robert Vernon, running writer for the Dallas Morning News.

The verdict was that the 72-year-old Lydiard “is in great shape for a man his age. Remarkably fit.”

Vernon recalls, “Several years ago I asked Peter, now that he’s an exercise scientist, if he would change anything about the way Lydiard had trained him. He said he would.”

The reporter recently asked that same question again. “Knowing what I know now,” said Snell, “I wouldn’t change much of anything.

“Previously I thought there were reasons he should or shouldn’t have done certain things. But the more I study the subject, the more research data I gather, the more I realize that what he did was right.”

Today’s scientists who attend Lydiard’s lectures come away shaking their heads at his sometimes garbled descriptions of the science behind his methods. But Snell defends the coach by saying, “Basically I think he had done all the tests on himself and had come up with a program that was – and is – scientifically sound.

“What’s more, he knew what worked. What we, as scientists, have been doing for the past 20 years is finding out why it works – essentially validating what Arthur already knew.”

UPDATE. Now 77, Dr. Peter Snell continues to live and work in Dallas. No other man has won both the 800 and 1500 in the same Olympics since Snell did it 50 years ago.

Sebastian Coe of Britain came closest with a gold (1500) and a silver (800) in both 1980 and 1984. Coe’s low-mileage, high-intensity training contrasted sharply with the Snell/Lydiard emphasis on long runs.

[Many books of mine, old and recent, are now available in two different formats: in print and as ebooks from Amazon.com. Latest released was Miles to Go. Other titles: Going Far, Home Runs, Joe’s Journal, Joe’s Team, Learning to Walk, Long Run Solution, Long Slow Distance, Pacesetters, Run Right Now, Run Right Now Training Log, See How We Run, and Starting Lines, plus Rich Englehart’s book about me, Slow Joe.]

Frank Shorter

(This piece is for my book titled Pacesetters: Runners Who Informed Me Best and Inspired Me Most. I am posting an excerpt here each week, this one from October 1988.)

AMONG FRIENDS. Frank Shorter first sat down to dinner with me in 1971. He had become a marathoner that day at the national championship race in Eugene.

Shorter didn’t eat anything. He couldn’t. His first marathon had so upset him that he paled at the sight of food.

He showed me that night what I was just starting to realize at the time. I was a hero-worshipper who hadn’t yet seen many heroes up close. I held them in awe and imagined they were made of different stuff than I was.

Seeing him fighting nausea demonstrated that faster and slower runners are mainly divided by speed. Otherwise we’re more alike than different.

The stars get sick too. They get hurt. They get tired and bored and worried. They need help from their friends.

Seventeen years passed between my first and second meals with Frank Shorter. The recent one reminded me again that, appearances aside, he is still one of us.

We were in West Virginia for the 15-mile Charleston Distance Run. We went to a country club for a buffet dinner.

Shorter exchanged small-talk with the sponsors and officials during the cocktail hour. But when it came time to eat, they left to find their friends. The most famous guest took his meal seated alone.

He is, in a way, a victim of his fame. As Olympic Marathon champion, NBC-TV track analyst and spiritual leader of the U.S. running boom, he’s held in greater awe than ever.

His manner makes him appear unapproachable. His prep school and Ivy League training combine with his natural reserve to give the impression that he is cool and aloof.

Shorter is treated as royalty, to be admired only from a distance. Runners are still shy about walking up to him and talking about what they have in common.

He knows this. He now tries to put people at ease, and as he does, the friendly side of him shines through the regal bearing.

He approached me in Charleston to start a conversation. This had never happened before.

He complimented me on something or other, and asked about my son who was on the trip. He spoke of plans to visit his early home in Ward Hollow, West Virginia, where his father worked as a coalmine doctor.

We talked about my recent article on the 1972 Olympic team. Most of his teammates from that year are still active in the sport.

“We had something then that’s missing now,” said Shorter. “We trained together. We helped each other. We were friends.”

Shorter had intentionally tied for first place with Jack Bacheler in track races as far back as 1970, when they started training together in Florida. Shorter and Kenny Moore had shared first place in the 1972 Olympic Marathon Trails.

Shorter, Bacheler and Jeff Galloway had trained as a team at altitude for the Munich Games. Shorter had agreed to share the pace in some of Steve Prefontaine’s record attempts.

“You don’t see that anymore,” Frank said. “Maybe the Mormons in Utah [Olympians Ed Eyestone, Henry Marsh and Doug Padilla] do it to a degree. But otherwise it’s basically every man for himself.”

Before leaving for Charleston, I’d read a newspaper article about Shorter. It had good quotes from him, but they didn’t relate to anything I planned to write at the time.

After Charleston his comments related perfectly to our talk there, so I rescued them from the recycle basket. Bill Higgins of the Cape Cod Times asked Shorter to assess his role in leading running to where it is now.

“I understand my part in all of it,” he said, “and I respect that I have an image. But what’s important to me is that I don’t try to be someone I’m not.” He is not untouchable.

“I want those around me who matter – my family and a few close friends – to appreciate me for who I am. The recognition is nice, but that’s not why I do what I do.” He does it for most of the reasons we all do.

UPDATE. Shorter got his wish that top American runners train together again, as he had in the 1970s. The best of them now team up at centers such as Portland, Eugene, Boston, Mammoth Lakes, Flagstaff and Rochester, Michigan.

[Many books of mine, old and recent, are now available in two different formats: in print and as ebooks from Amazon.com. Latest released was Miles to Go. Other titles: Going Far, Home Runs, Joe’s Journal, Joe’s Team, Learning to Walk, Long Run Solution, Long Slow Distance, Pacesetters, Run Right Now, Run Right Now Training Log, See How We Run, and Starting Lines, plus Rich Englehart’s book about me, Slow Joe.]

Dr. George Sheehan

(This piece is for my book titled Pacesetters: Runners Who Informed Me Best and Inspired Me Most. I am posting an excerpt here each week, this one from April 1993.)

SHEEHAN NIGHT. What if someone threw a party in your honor and no one showed up? That was George Sheehan’s fear when local friends approached his son George III about organizing a dinner for The Doc (as they called him).

Young George then broached the subject with his dad. Dr. George’s first reaction: “Definitely not.”

“Fine,” said the son. “It’s your call.”

The next morning “Dad came to the office with 10 pages of notes. They told where the party could be held, what the program might be and who should be invited.”

Later Dr. George started to worry that no one would come. “I gave a recent talk in Florida, and only a dozen people showed up,” he said. “What if that happens here?”

“No chance of that,” the son reminded the dad. “We’ll draw a crowd with the Sheehans alone.” Just to be safe they extended the invitation list and published an announcement in local newspapers. By the time I left home for New Jersey, the guest list stood at 300 and was still growing.

Young George said, “We could top 400.” The crowd would grow to 500.

The event frightened Dr. George but attracted him too. Doors at the Shore Casino didn’t officially open until five o’clock that Sunday, but he couldn’t wait that long. We got there almost an hour early.

Tim McLoone, the evening’s MC, and George Hirsch of Runner’s World, a key speaker, tried to shoo Dr. George away as he walked in on their rehearsal.

“He won’t even notice,” I told them. “He’ll soon be too busy talking.”

And so he was. The crowd – his crowd – couldn’t wait to get there either. Long before the official opening, the room was well on its way to full.

I knew few of these people. This both surprised and pleased me, because it showed George to be much more than a running specialist.

He had traveled in many circles: family, running and writing circles; medical, school and community circles. These circles all joined here for perhaps the first time.

We talked, we drank, we ate. This all took three hours but was only a warmup for the marathon to follow.

Paying tribute to George Sheehan took a long time. He had lived almost 75 full years, and the program planners couldn’t leave out any of his phases. The program took another three hours to cover them all.

Finally, on the far side of 10 o’clock, George himself took the stage. His voice came out quiet, slow and hoarse at first.

Then as he warmed to his topic and his audience, this became the George Sheehan we’d always known: lively, eloquent, funny and heartfelt. Everyone else had taken care to avoid the subject that brought us all here. George himself didn’t hesitate to mention what everyone knew he faced.

He said, “Dying [of advanced prostate cancer] is my current experience. I’m going to face it and find out what it’s all about.”

The night ended with an emotional showing of family slides, set to music on videotape. Then the guests took another hour saying their good-byes to George, who along with the other Sheehans, nearly 60 of them, were last to leave the casino.

This was a relatively modest count by Sheehan standards. He said, “When my mother died, she left 76 grandchildren and a total of 135 survivors. Someone said it sounded like a plane crash.”

With his finish line in sight, George felt fortunate. He’d had an early wake of sorts, when he could be there to enjoy it with 500 of his nearest and dearest. We should all be so lucky.

UPDATE. All 500 of us wanted to be there that night. But none of us quite knew what to call the event we were attending.

We couldn’t call it a “farewell” because none of us was ready to let go. A “celebration,” a “party,” a “roast”? None of these labels quite fit.

George himself wryly suggested, “Why not call it ‘the last supper’? After all, it’s on Palm Sunday.” But that sounded too final.

Maybe we should have called it a “thanksgiving dinner.” This was George’s chance to thank his family, friends, running companions and co-workers for their love. And it was our chance to say the same to him.

George died later that year, a few days before his 75^th birthday. More than 20 years after his passing, George’s words keep informing and inspiring runners, via his books that remain in print. He would delight in the irony of this.

In Dr. Sheehan on Running, the book of his that I still like the best, George explained his penchant for quoting the master thinkers of history – from Socrates to Santayana – in his own writing and speaking. “My family rarely gives me any credit for original thought,” he wrote. “When a topic comes under discussion at the dinner table, someone is likely to turn to me and ask, ‘What would Bucky Fuller say about that?’

George himself became a valued source of quotable quotes. He gave voice to what other runners thought or felt or sensed, but couldn’t find the words to express as well as he did.

Name any subject related to the running experience – and many subjects far removed from sports – and this master thinker had found just the right words to describe it. His friends and fans would ask ourselves, “What would George Sheehan say about that?”

His words survive. To a wordsmith that’s the ultimate form of winning.

[Many books of mine, old and recent, are now available in two different formats: in print and as ebooks from Amazon.com. Latest released was Miles to Go. Other titles: Going Far, Home Runs, Joe’s Journal, Joe’s Team, Learning to Walk, Long Run Solution, Long Slow Distance, Pacesetters, Run Right Now, Run Right Now Training Log, See How We Run, and Starting Lines, plus Rich Englehart’s book about me, Slow Joe.]